Ukraine says counteroffensive has liberated seven villages in southeast
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MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — As battles raged Tuesday along the front line in Ukraine’s southeast, Russia responded to Kyiv’s counteroffensive with its latest deadly overnight missile barrage, killing at least 11 people and injuring more than 20 in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s native city of Kryvyi Rih. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine. ArrowRight In the early morning hours, Russian forces fired 14 cruise missiles, of which the Ukrainian Air Force said 11 were intercepted by air defenses. But missiles struck a residential building and a warehouse in Kryvyi Rih, a working-class steel and mining town.
Zelensky posted a video on his Telegram channel, showing flames leaping from the ruins of a building that was hit and the smoldering remains of cars. “More terrorist missiles,” Zelensky wrote. “Russian killers continue their war against residential buildings, ordinary cities and people.”
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The strike in Kryvyi Rih occurred as Ukraine continued to press its counterattack against the Russian troops occupying its territory, with heavy fighting reported in at least four key locations — in the Donetsk region, east of Lyman, on the outskirts of Bakhmut, and in Marinka, and the Zaporizhzhia region, south of Orikhiv.
“The enemy is doing everything to keep the positions captured by him,” Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar wrote in a Telegram post. “[He] actively uses assault and army aviation [and] conducts intense artillery fire.”
Kryvyi Rih Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul declared Wednesday to be a day of mourning, and said that at least 28 people were injured, of which 12 were hospitalized. Some 6,000 people were without power early Tuesday in the city. Workers were briefly trapped in three mines as a result power outages but were later rescued, the Ukrainian government said.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting with journalists on Tuesday, insisted that Ukraine was suffering heavy losses and that Kyiv’s counteroffensive was not working.
“The enemy has had no success in any of the areas,” Putin said, adding: “During this time, Ukraine has lost over 160 tanks and over 360 armored vehicles. There are more losses that we do not see. Let our personnel losses be voiced by the Ministry of Defense, but we have lost 54 tanks. The ratio is 1 to 10 in our favor. Our losses are 10 times less.” His assertions could not be confirmed.
Not all of the fighting Tuesday was part of the long-awaited counteroffensive.
Serhiy Cherevaty, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said the fighting outside of Lyman, a city that Ukraine liberated in the fall, reflected customary defensive operations against the Russian invaders.
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“This is not an element of a major offensive,” Cherevaty said by telephone from eastern Ukraine. “This is part of our defense operation. We, taking advantage of the fact that we could counterattack on the enemy, launched a counterattack and liberated the territory accordingly.”
Cherevaty said that 27 Russians had been killed and 75 wounded in the fighting near Lyman, but he did not give figures for Ukrainian casualties, and the Russian casualty figures he gave could not be confirmed.
Near the border of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, where Ukraine said on Monday that it had liberated seven villages from Russian occupation, soldiers of the 35th Separate Marine Brigade said they had cleared the village of Storozheve on Sunday morning and Makarivka on Monday.
Serhii Kozachynskyi, a spokesman for the brigade, said an artillery unit had destroyed Russian positions in the area, allowing the two villages to be retaken.
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About 80 to 90 percent of the homes in both villages were destroyed. Only nine people were living in Storozheve when Ukrainian soldiers ousted the Russian troops, and seven of those residents were evacuated, Kozachynskyi said.
When they retreated, Russian soldiers left weapons and at least one large truck filled with ammunition, he said.
The brigade, he said, does not have any of the new, NATO-supplied weapons, and while some individual soldiers had trained in countries including Britain, Norway and Spain, the entire brigade had not been sent abroad, as had occurred with some specialized attack units.
“The soldiers are highly motivated to move the enemy out of our territory, to finish the war as fast as they can,” Kozachynskyi said. “Even not having all of the equipment, they can perform the tasks that are required to move the enemy out of here.”
The marine brigade, which was previously based in Odessa on the Black Sea coast, and later in Kherson, has gained ample experience from more than a year of fighting, which prepared it for this push, he said.
“We are pushing forward,” Kozachynskyi said. “Everybody understands there is still a lot of area to clear out.”
Schmidt reported from Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
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Source: The Washington Post
